Grants talk:PEG/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2013 coordination

GAC members who have read this request but had no comments

1. . Thuvack (talk) 15:37, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

GAC members who have read, studied and concluded their assessment (of) the proposal

1. . After detailed answers I have no doubt that the project should be supported. Maybe some more detailed budget (with explanation of some basic terms, as given in answers here, would be helpful for other GAC members and WLM staff...) Good luck. Polimerek (talk) 22:06, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
2. All questions I would have asked have already been answered or surely will be. I support this request. 79.215.149.188 09:54, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Support this request. Regards, --ProtoplasmaKid (WM-MX) (talk) 18:55, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
4. With the answers already provided to the same questions I had in mind I Support this grant proposal. -- Roel (talk) 06:35, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
5. After answers I can say I support this request. Best with it! --MikyM (talk) 19:46, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
6. Oppose per my thread below. Tony (talk) 16:19, 25 July 2013 (UTC) I've voiced� my disapproval of the funding of this vague budget elsewhere. Tony (talk) 07:45, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

GAC members who abstain from comment/vote

1. I would abstain because I approve in general this event but I disapprove how the funding of the overall event is organized. The GAC receives frequently requests for local chapters to organize WLM and the budget is sometime really expensive. In general I think that the organization of WLM (not only international) is going to be an important item to use the funds of WMF but the financial aspect is not well organized. I would support this budget if it will rationalize the costs and will reduce the budget required by the local organizers. --Ilario (talk) 09:22, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

As I generally support the idea and understand the need to have international WLM team, I ask to clarify and to be more specific with budget.

1. Meeting & Meeting travel - how many meetings do you plan, where and how the costs were calculated?
2. Grant system - what does it exactly mean?
3. Workshops - again - where, who is about to attend, how the costs were calculated?
4. Professional support - what does it exactly mean? If this is about for salary for someone - it should be clearly explained - for whom, what kind of work employed staff is about to do etc.

And the last - but quite important question: Who supported financially 2012 WLM and why it cannot be continued?

Polimerek (talk) 06:32, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the comments. I will answer the ones that I can answer out of hand first, and get back to you about the rest later.

1. The meeting costs are primarily to be expected for an evaluation meeting to ensure a good evaluation and potential knowledge transfer in January 2014. If this meeting happens, it will be significantly expensive due to the international nature of this international team (we have members from Europe, but also India and Panama). Of course before organizing the actual meeting we will re-evaluate whether it will still be helpful (i.e. will there be a WLM 2014?).

2. The grant system is intended as a fallback system for national organizers. In an ideal world every national organization is able to find locally sponsorships and grants, and we encourage them to go after this. In case they are unable to find anything, and the local competition is threatened by it, we would like to be able to provide up to 300 euro per country as a mini-grant with low bureaucracy and a simplified process. This amount is a bit high compared to last year because it is hard to estimate how many countries will use this opportunity.

3. The idea behind the workshops was that a member of the international team (or someone else who is sufficiently experienced in organizing Wiki Loves Monuments) can visit a national team, and give a workshop to them about how to organize a Wiki Loves Monuments in their country. The exact shape, costs and attendance will differ on a country-by-country basis but will always be focused on helping them to organize more effectively and efficiently. We lowered this amount already significantly due to the timeline - and it is no longer realistic more than 1 (if any) workshop can be organized. Last year more workshops were organized, but mostly out of budget and paid for by Wikimedia chapters directly.

4. I will get back to you about this.

5. Last years the international component was financed directly by Wikimedia chapters. In 2012 this was primarily Wikimedia Nederland and Wikimedia Deutschland - with smaller contributions from Wikimedia Polska and Wikimedia Israel. In the end this was also money from the Wikimedia movement, but this particular construction was no longer possible. Wikimedia Deutschland primarily assisted by providing budget for a staff support, but that department indicated for this year that their focus would be different and this was no longer possible. Wikimedia Nederland did not incorporate this as part of their FDC-request, the amount of which was already lowered, and therefore has not the budget available to fund this. Effeietsanders (talk) 07:04, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi Polimerek, I'm here to answer your question about the professional support. The WLM-internation team thinks that professional support is needed for these two areas:

• Project management: the international team needs help with keeping track of tasks and getting things done. This would be a partial-time position.
• Technical infrastracture: we need to make sure that the technical infrastructure of WLM (db mappings, erfgoedbot, UploadCampaigns, ...) is working. We know that there are some maintenance tasks needed (e.g. erfgoedbot has to be migrated from Toolserver to WMF Tool Labs) but we think that currently our volunteers have not enough for this, so we want to hire professional support to do this task which has a deadline (everything has to be working on September 1st).

Technical support has priority with respect to project management support.

The practical implementation of both these position will be hiring a contractor or freelancer with a fixed term contract. This contract will be made between with the fiscal sponsor. -- CristianCantoro (talk) 21:47, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

OK. Thank you for your detailed answers. Polimerek (talk) 22:04, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete form

Hello, WLM International Team! Please define an end date for this grant: right now only a month is currently listed. Thank you, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 19:00, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Sure, I picked the last day of the month if you need a specific date. Effeietsanders (talk) 17:49, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 19:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Rename request

Please rename this request to reflect that this is not actually a grant to WMNL. WMNL is acting as the fiscal sponsor, but the request is made on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments international coordination team 2013. You may name it something like, "Grants:Effeietsanders - Wiki Loves Monuments international coordination team 2013/Wiki Loves Monuments international 2013" to reflect that this request is actually submitted on behalf of an unincorporated group.

I think renaming it now may save some confusion later on. Thanks for your cooperation Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Of course, feel free to something you consider appropriate. I do not think using a single name would be correct though, that would give me too much credit. Effeietsanders (talk) 06:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Just done that—it looks like the template used adds broken categories, but I'm sure you GAC guys can get it fixed. odder (talk) 12:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Odder! We do need this request to have a requestor as well as a title so that it is named like other grant requests. "Grants:Wiki Loves Monuments international coordination team 2013/Wiki Loves Monuments international 2013" would work if you prefer not to associate a username with this group. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 17:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

But why? It doesn't make any sense to me to have the same thing repeated twice in a page title. odder (talk) 18:09, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Because we aim to have all grant pages name both the recipient and the project. It so happens that in this case the recipient is named after the project, so it seems a little redundant, when it really isn't. Feel free to abbreviate the second incidence to WLM if that would make you more comfortable. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 21:53, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Should be done now. odder (talk) 21:56, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Works for me. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 22:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Some points to be fixed

I would recall two main important points of the request of Polimerek.

• Grant system: I think that the countries who have already requested a grant for their organization should be excluded. This system is a little bit critical because there is no written criteria to assign these microgrants and, at the moment, the whole financial support may be assigned to one country (so it will not be a microgrant)... it would be good also to define how the international team will evaluate the assignement of these microgrants
• Professional support: I think that this point is critical too. There are open points of conflict of interests (some members of the staff are board members of some Wikimedias) and also a problem of definition of the tasks assigned to these people. It would be good to split this item defining clearly the position of the paid staff, this will help also GAC to check if there is an overlapping with the local teams organizing the local contests

Even if I support the event in general, I think that the financial management of the local contests are becoming critical. In GAC we receive a lot of financial requests for local contests and now there is a request to the international level, my opinion is that the microgrant system can be extended (so less work for GAC) but it should be supported by strong criteria, and it's also important to know the paid positions of the the international team (do you distribute this money within the organizers? do you pay a FTE? Who pay them and make a contract with them? The international team or WM NL?). --Ilario (talk) 08:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

• • Dear Ilario, I think there is some minor misunderstanding about the "Grant system" and the "professional support". Would love to clarify that! The Wiki Loves Monuments International (WLMi) team will only play as a lender of last resort to the local (national) WLM organisers. That means, if there a team which tried its level best to find partners and sponsors for the local contest but failed to, the WLMi team will help but financially but only for the prize money (or to buy vouchers what ever they prefer). Otherwise, it will not be easy for us to grant funds to every other groups. We are very inexperienced for that compared to GAC!
  • I'm little confused what you mean by "some members of the staff are board members of some Wikimedias", but what I understand that is you mean to say that some of the members of WLMi teams are board members of Chapters. You can find more about our team here. We feel that we need help from a full timer who will make sure that technical infrastructure of WLM is working. This is something which will be difficult for a volunteer to take it up, as this involves not only building certain tools, but also maintaining it.
  • Something important to note is that the WLMi team has taken this project on completely volunteer basis, and that the "Professional support" funds will not be distributed among us. It will be just used to pay the full timer. WMNL will take care of of the administrative side of things such as contract and payments.
  • Hope it clarifies. Thanks!! -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 18:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Scale down needed

I am reluctant to fund this proposal as it stands, as I am not convinced the value justifies the expense. Taking into account the significant movement expenditure on WLM this year beside this request, this request seems excessive to me. In particular, I don't see enough justification for a 15k Euro expenditure on staff support.

I urge the organizers to find a way to scale this down significantly, to no more than 25k-30k Euros. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 19:11, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

We have prepared and published an amendment to the grant request, resulting in a significant reduction of the budget for the international team of Wiki Loves Monuments 2013. We have considered all options and feel that in the current state of affairs it is the only possible way to make such a drastic last minute cut — with as little damage to the competition as possible.

It speaks for itself that the expectations have to be adjusted accordingly — most specifically with regards to the support that can be provided for the national teams and the transfer of knowledge to a possible future organizing team. Some part of the cuts can be justified by the delays in our timeline (partially because of our own doing, partially because of this slow process) and their negative effect stil can be avoided — but other parts will have a real impact on the competition.

Let us be very clear: we disagree with your demand, and we disagree with the process in which this grant request has been handled. While we do see that some items could be reduced a little, we strongly disagree with your decision that such a substantial reduction is necessary or even desirable.

We are especially sorry that you did not bring up your apparently strong objections to this budget earlier in the process. We discussed this quite openly with you even before the submission, yet you only bring forward your opinion many weeks after the request had been submitted — even against the advice of most of the GAC members that offered an opinion (hence it must be your opinion). You will probably have good reasons for not sharing these strong concerns earlier, but we believe that not doing so has been detrimental to the project.

In any case, we have little choice but to simply accept your decision — and have reduced the budget as demanded. We hope that this will result in a swift approval of the modified grant request so that we can organize the competition with all volunteers involved, to the best of our abilities.

On behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments international team, Effeietsanders (talk) 22:16, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

moved from user discussion page

Not willing to mess with the grant talk page, I'm going to say this: I'm astounded to hear that you think the value that Wiki Loves Monuments brings to the movement might not justify the expense. From all community initiatives, you've picked one that's biggest in terms of volunteer involvement and new content, has proven to be a great way to recruit new editors, and has been constantly underspent. I'm at a loss of words, so I'm going to leave it to the rest of the international team to comment on your suggestion. odder (talk) 19:34, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I am yet to see compelling evidence of a lasting editor recruitment attributable to WLM. There is no doubt there's value in WLM. But how much value? $100K worth? $300K worth? $3M worth? We frankly don't have a concrete way to answer that question yet. I acknowledge my position is based on subjective assessment. I'm happy to hear arguments to change my mind. I'm afraid your being astounded doesn't, per se, suffice. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 20:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps you might want to look into Erik Zachte's statistics on the subject, then. I'm afraid that your questions can be asked about every single Wikimedia Foundation initiative, which cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nobody asks about their value. Not to mention that for reasons unknown to me, you started asking questions a month after the request was submitted, which introduces a lot of unnecessary stress and effectively forces us to make rushed changes. And, finally, you ask us to cut back on the budget and yet suggest that we provide up to 40 national teams with server space and tech support for websites that will get several million pageviews in a month. I see no sense in that. (Disclaimer: These are only my opinions; I have not consulted them with the rest of the WLM international team and they might not necessarily agree with me.) odder (talk) 09:53, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I think Asaf may already have taken Erik Zachte's statistics into account. At least the authors of the "State of the Decline" presentation at the last WMF monthly metrics meeting did, when they highlighted WLM as as example of an activity in the movement that can drive participation, but that "retention is low, takes lots of organizational effort" (citing Erik Zachte's number for WLM 2012). To reconcile this assessment, or the active editor report card for Commons (where no lasting effect of WLM is visible), with Erik Zachte's post, be aware that he counted every new WLM contributor as retained who contributed to any wiki at any point in time in November or later. The number of those who sustain their activity at a level that makes them show up in the active editor stats is probably much lower. 1.6% of the new WLM 2011 participants were active in the month of May 2012 according to [1] (perhaps even less by the definition of the report card).

(No opinions on the scale of this grant, just wanting to clarify the editor stats aspects.)

Regard, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 13:09, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

PS: Coincidentally, Lodewijk just published an interesting blog post that repeats some of the numbers from Erik Zachte's earlier post and expands on them. It's also worth reading as a summary of the impressive participation numbers during the contests themselves, although these may have been published elsewhere already. Lodewijk's post confirms that a new WLM participant is counted as "remained active" after a given time if they make just one edit (e.g. someone who joined Commons as a WLM participant in 2011, and subsequently made exactly one edit in, say, May 2012 to fix a typo in the description of one of their WLM uploads, is counted as retained). This definition wasn't entirely clear from the earlier post.

So Asaf's question about "compelling evidence of a lasting editor recruitment attributable to WLM" remains open for the time being. One idea on how to answer it: Using Erik's dataset, it should be easy to calculate, for any given month, the number of active editors on Commons (as defined for the report card) who made their first (logged-in) contribution as part of a particular prior WLM contest.

Lastly, let's not forget that the value of WLM lies also in the content that it brings in (fighting the deadline), and in the enthusiasm it generates among existing volunteers around the world.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

While I don't want to be dragged into a welles/nietes (yes/no) discussion, I would like to make a few clarifying remarks here. The blog post was planned for a long time, but Asaf and Tilman's remarks with the negative undertone were somewhat a trigger for it. My intention was not at all to give perfect numbers or a mathematical proof that Wiki Loves Monuments is a perfect project. However, what I do think these numbers show is that there definitely is a long term impact. And personally, I think 4% retention with this definition is a very nice number. I'm too sorry that you can't compare it with WMF numbers, but this is simply because of what I had available. This is easiest to measure.

It is not the goal of Wiki Loves Monuments to create data like this, but if it becomes available we surely like to share it. Yes, there's a different definition for 'active' than in the report cards - but that doesn't make it less useful. Because what it shows to me is that even more than two years later, 4% of the users logs in every 6 months to edit. Bothers to remember their password, and log in - even if that is just to correct a spelling mistake. That sounds like a big win to me. Also, the number of contributions made by these new editors is encouraging. Sure, they could be more specific, but 600.000 is more than the total of all WLM submissions together - including those by power users. Of course I'd encourage you to create better statistics to your own definitions, and compare them to a random set of new editors, or other projects (if their data set is statistically significant - i.e. I wouldn't consider the 2010 competition alone to be that). Everybody would only learn from that. (This is a personal note.) Effeietsanders (talk) 22:18, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Shared infrastructure and hosting

I am also concerned about the "shared infrastructure" item -- one advantage I would have liked the movement to reap from funding an international WLM coordination team is centralizing the costs of hosting and Web design. Instead, we see multiple WLM national teams seeking funding for hosting and Web design (quite apart from a national domain name, which I understand is infeasible to centralize, in many jurisdictions). Why doesn't the international team undertake to host (the fairly lightweight) WLM sites centrally, and to provide a customizable design, perhaps even with a couple of hours of a designer's time to customize for each national team's preference? Or am I missing something? Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 03:28, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions. We would definitely encourage you to make them during the evaluation process after the competition — it might be useful if there will be a next edition. At this point in time, we don't think it would be realistic to implement your proposals in the 2013 competition.

Besides that, we do have a few thoughts about them in general. It would be good to remember that Wiki Loves Monuments is intentionally designed in a federative way, not centrally organized. We organize a few things centrally, but every country is able (and encouraged) to organize their own national competition in the way that it works best in their country. That often includes taking care of the national websites using resources the countries have at hand, and making technical decisions that work best for them.

As the international team, we have been aiming to help the national teams as much as possible, and not only have provided them with a single, volunteer-created and freely licensed website template (and support), but have also helped with day-to-day functioning of some websites during the month of September (take the Indian or Mexican national websites as examples) and organized and oversaw technical cooperation between some of the countries.

With the limited budget and technical resources we have, it is, however, unrealistic for the international team to take care of the functioning of the 40 or so national websites. Not only because we lack the required manpower, expertise and funds to take up such a massive task and responsibility, but also because doing so would introduce a single point of failure, something that we try to avoid as much as possible.

So to summarize, the main reasons why we do not provide countries with a shared website infrastructure are as follows: because every country has different requirements, because of the lack of required resources, because of the potential single point of failure, and because that would simply not fit with how WLM works. I hope that explains. Of course further thoughts on this topic would be welcome in an evaluation of the project.

On behalf of the international team, Effeietsanders (talk) 22:19, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Concerns

I believe the budget is insufficiently justified, both in terms of the expressed intentions and the lack of detail. Where there are increases in spending from last year (often major increases), they pass without comment or justification. There are nooks and crannies and smoke and mirrors: 10% added so you can do the budget "more conservatively"? What is the "extension of professional staff", please?

As usual, the "How will this project support the key organizational objectives of" section is dysfunctional (this is not the applicants' fault—except, the title is a bit weird).

Just a personal observation: will there be better instructions/guidelines to participants this year to reduce the proportion of c...p that was uploaded last year? So often, just a slight adjustment in composition could have significantly improved an image (like: "try to avoid parked cars in front of beautiful historic buildings", and basic advice about leaving a little space above the head of the statue). And is there any explicit talk of the thematic breakdown, with lots and lots of churches, and not much of other things? Some qualitative organisation (in a number of languages) would certainly be worth an investment of donors' funds. Will the categorisation and description-page efforts be better organised this year?

Memo: if you're going to write the application in English, please don't do the currencies backwards and upside-down: not 3.700,00 €, but €3,700; and please drop the raft of zeros—to the nearest euro/dollar is fine. Otherwise, could you write it in another language?

Tony (talk) 13:13, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for these comments, Tony. But please, let's be more tolerant of people's habits of currency notation (the western European style, the Indian style) -- it's not too difficult to mentally correct, and grant discussions -- unlike articles on Wikipedia -- only need to communicate meaning effectively; their aesthetic value, diction, and spelling do not matter so long as the meaning is clear. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 18:37, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Liefste Tony,

First I'll reply to a few valid remarks in English, and then as requested to the rest in Dutch. The increases compared to last year are actually quite minimal — and often with good reason. For example, the technical support was introduced this year. This was mostly because this was a lesson from the 2012 evaluation — more technical support was necessary to secure a stable infrastructure. This was especially important after the very experienced and able Multichill decided to focus his attention on other projects this year.

Like last year, we also decided to include an item for 10% of unforeseen expenses. So far nobody has questioned that, and I assumed that not to be necessary. As you can understand, projects primarily run by volunteers have to be flexible. That means that funds have to be available at short notice ideally. This could mean that we budget a bit extra in every item, or that we add an item for unforeseen expenses. This is not entirely uncommon I believe, and in our case IMHO quite sensible.

Last year there was some professional staff available in the project management field. This year, due to the unfortunate circumstances of the complicated budgeting cycle (I'll spare you the details but it involved WMF policies, WMNL budget process, unexpected Italian laws and this very GAC) we didn't hire such support, but we did evaluate already in January that technical support was very much required this year. As explained also above and in the proposal.

Ook ik vond het deel over hoe het de doelstellingen ondersteunt niet de handigste bewoording, maargoed - we hebben zo goed als we konden het formulier ingevuld. Ik zou willen voorstellen dat je verbeteringen voor het formulier bij de WMF neerlegt.

De richtlijnen richting de deelnemers van de wedstrijd zijn de directe verantwoordelijkheid van de nationale teams. Weliswaar adviseren wij ze over verschillende zaken hieromtrent, maar hier hebben we geen directe invloed op. Als je specifieke suggesties hebt, stel ik voor dat je die neerlegt bij de respectievelijke nationale teams. Ik betwijfel sterk dat je alle richtlijnen in alle landen hebt geanalyseerd. Dit geldt ook voor je suggesties met betrekking tot land-specifieke onderverdelingen en categoriebomen. Ik vind echter wel dat ik op dien te merken dat je opmerkingen hierover licht ongepast zijn op deze plek. Dit gaat om de projectaanvraag, en niet de specifieke uitwerkingen. Wiki Loves Monuments wordt erg open georganiseerd door vrijwilligers, en je kunt daarin volledig je ei kwijt. Daarvoor hoef je absoluut niet je positie als lid van deze adviescommissie te mis- of gebruiken.

Je suggesties met betrekking tot het noteren van valuta zijn interessant, maar verder irrelevant voor de aanvraag. Ik stel voor dat als je dit belangrijk vindt, dat je het opneemt in de documentatie van het formulier, zodat een volgende aanvrager er zijn of haar voordeel mee kan doen. Op je uitdrukkelijke verzoek heb ik dit antwoord in het Nederlands geschreven. Ik zou Karthik kunnen vragen of hij eventuele follow-up in het hindi wil doen. (This is a personal note.) Effeietsanders (talk) 22:20, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Nawiązując jeszcze do wypowiedzi Lodewijka chciałbym zauważyć, Tony, że wydajesz się w swoim poście trochę nieobiektywny. Oczywiście, niezaprzeczalnym faktem jest, że w ramach Wiki Loves Monuments przesyłanych jest mnóstwo fotografii miernej jakości i jako międzynarodowi koordynatorzy nigdy nie twierdziliśmy inaczej. Nie ma jednak żadnych dowodów na poparcie tezy o tym, jakoby w ramach WLM użytkownicy przesyłali stosunkowo więcej fotografii niskiej jakości niż dzieje się to na Commons każdego dnia.

Fotografowie-amatorzy zawsze będą przesyłać fotografie wyglądające amatorsko, cześć i czapka; my jako organizatorzy międzynarodowi możemy jedynie – jak wspomina Lodewijk – zasugerować lokalnym organizatorom, że warto byłoby na stronach projektów wspomnieć o minimalnych wymogach jakościowych i np. umieścić link do materiałów o technice fotografowania (np. na Wikibooks), lecz ostateczna decyzja leży już w gestii tych właśnie lokalnych specjalistów.

Ponieważ Lodewijk odpowiedział już na Twoje pytania w kwestii budżetu (i ponieważ w całości zgadzam się z jego opinią), pozwolę sobie teraz zadać jedno pytanie Tobie: w jaki sposób wyobrażasz sobie, żeby grupa osób z siedmiu państw, mówiących sześcioma różnymi językami, mogła stworzyć wspólnie jakikolwiek dokument nie posługując się językiem angielskim? Ciekawi mnie, w jaki sposób rozwiązałbyś taką sytuację. (This is a personal note.) odder (talk) 22:42, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Hk weinder que tlarum is neit destimi, venn tve yurren bent gelasten su gan. Ben doch zelande? Tony (talk) 03:51, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Notes upon approval

Thank you for these responses, and for reworking your proposal. I understand you are frustrated with my position. As I said above, I recognize there is no sufficiently persuasive objective way (yet! I do hope we'll have much better data and analysis before next year) to weigh the merit (see NB below) of WLM against the (total) investment the movement is called upon to make, and that from your perspective my judgment seems arbitrary. I submit to you that in the absence of a means for objective evaluation, automatically accepting any proposed budget would be equally arbitrary. What I’m trying to establish -- and is important for all of us in the movement to be thoughtful about -- is that we need some way of understanding the overall investment in WLM world-wide, and thereby to manage any possible economies of scale better.

That said, we are prepared to fund the reworked proposal as it stands. While I understand your disappointment in having to cut down some of the planned activities, I think there is still every reason to expect a successful WLM given this team's proven dedication.

I do welcome further discussion on the merit of the program (NB: not whether it has merit! -- that is beyond dispute -- but an attempt to qualify and indeed quantify the (quantifiable) aspects of merit) and look forward to the post-factum analysis of this year's WLM, when we would all be in a better position to assess the total investment (and not just in funds) versus the immediately-measurable gains, and subsequently versus additional, longer-term gains. We are significantly investing in WLM across the world, and while that itself speaks to its relative success, it should also lead to useful discussion on its impact relative to the investment. I expect there will be room for a fruitful collaboration on this between the WMF's own program evaluation efforts that have just launched, the WLM Int'l and national teams, and the wider community. In fact, given WLM’s undisputed merit, we would expect to see it leading the way in offering the movement good learning on how to maximise impact with an effective use of movement resources. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 04:50, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Except there was no response to the questions in my opening paragraph above: just a personal attack, as far as I can see. You reward this by instant approval? Tony (talk)

Asaf, let me mention again in my personal capacity as a Wiki Loves Monuments volunteer that you continue to astound me. The issue of the overall worldwide investment in Wiki Loves Monuments has been mentioned by the 2012 organizing team when we were preparing to evaluate the competition in January (this year). We asked you as the head of the grants programme to help us see how much money was spent on the competition in 2012, and I can't remember hearing back from you on this issue (correct me if I'm wrong). This is therefore not a new problem, and yet you bring it up almost a month after the original budget was submitted to you. Why is that?

I understand that the Foundation is investing significant amounts in the competition (and personally, I am really suprised at the amounts that some countries requested); yet, you seem to miss one of the most crucial points about Wiki Loves Monuments: that it is organized in a federative fashion (see the 2011 concept page or the 2012 FAQ for more on that). This means, among other things, that each and every country can organize the competition the way that works best in their local situation, with as much funds as they want (and are able to procure). As with other aspects of the competition; there are huge differences between how countries fund it; some request tens of thousands of dollars from the GAC (South Africa), some have their own funds and need not ask for anything (Germany, Poland), some use the small grants the international team offers (Mexico, Spain), and others spend nothing (Estonia).

This diversity and the underlying philosophy of Wiki Loves Monuments result in that the international coordinating team does not influence financial requests of the national teams, nor I believe does it want to (besides the common sense suggestions for reasonable spending). With this lack of central controlling body, each application should be therefore, in my opinion, evaluated and assessed in its own merit, and should not influence how other applications are assessed later on (nor should it be influenced by them). It is my impression that this unfortunately is exactly what's happening to this request.

As far as your expectation for a fruitful cooperation between the international WLM team and the WMF Program Evaluation and Design team goes, I'm afraid that this doesn't seem at all realistic to me at this point. I am aware that this lies outside your personal area of duty, but perhaps it might be worth harmonizing expectations between the various WMF teams; not denying a place to a designated Wiki Loves Monuments international team member at the recent PED meeting in Budapest might have been a really good step in that direction. (This is a personal note.) odder (talk) 11:43, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Asaf is doing just what he ought to: probing the details of the plan, given the WMF Board's strategic priority of transparency. (I'd drop the aggressive italics in the light of what many people would consider a rather generous approval.) If I were to object, it would be on the other side, that he has let through an application with a recklessly vague budget. What, for example, is the €10,000 "technical support" for? Why is something that is presumably multifacted not explained, at least in terms of the basic categories of input? What are we getting for our money, and what has been dropped from the duties in the one-third reduction from €15,000? Estimated number of hours for X, for Y, for Z, at how much per hour with on-costs. That is the normal standard when asking for money. Please remember that it will be necessary to compare your report with this budget, and at the moment we're in the dark. And you've been given a slush-fund of €2650, untied. I disapprove of the funding as it stands. Tony (talk) 12:21, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Financial overview

Below you will find an overview of expected expenditure under the WMF grant to the Wiki Loves Monuments International Coordination Team. This overview was compiled by the team at the request of the WMNL as Fiscal Sponsor.

Costs	Grant budget	Expected costs	Remarks
Prizes	€4000	€4000	Expected. To kick-off from December.
Calendars	€4000	€4000	Expected. To kick-off from December.
Shipping & boxes calendars	€5000	€5000	Expected. To kick-off from December.
Thank-you & goodies	€1000	€1000	-
World exhibition	-	-	-
Grant system	€1500	€360	Only from Thailand and El Salvador
Meeting & Meeting travel	€1000	-	No plans
Workshops	-	-	-
Professional support	€10000	-	Plan dropped because of time constraints. Amount will not be spent.
Unforeseen	€2650	€2650
TOTAL	€29,150	€17.010	€12.140 expected unspent grant

SRientjes (talk) 16:07, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! This is helpful.

(I am surprised at the precision of the budgeting for "unforeseen"...) Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 19:22, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Extension of reporting deadline

Wrapping up all elements of the WLM-international competition (especially getting the prized to the winners) is taking more time than originally foreseen. Also, the reporting process is coinciding with reporting obligations of WMNL, the fiscal sponsor, under the FDC-process. In order to do everything properly, we would like to request an extension of the reporting deadline until April 15, 2014. SRientjes (talk) 11:17, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

This request has been approved. The new report deadline is April 15, 2014. Thank you for your timely communication. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 29 March 2014 (UTC)